CIO Conferences

According to a Gartner survey, a lack of clarity on the digital destination is holding back enterprises to enable digital business acceleration.

Executive leaders should be clear about key digital initiatives and have a shared understanding of necessary business model changes. CIOs can have frequent strategic conversations with CxOs to understand their individual ambitions and concerns. Such discussions can educate stakeholders and build clear digital narratives around optimizing the existing business models or developing new platform-based business models.

When executive leaders actively take on new roles to accelerate digital business, there is a much greater chance for success. In organizations where digital dexterity is low, CIOs can demonstrate traits like openness to innovation and risks to drive a mindset of continuous improvement among CxOs and help them adopt more inclusive, collaborative and cross-functional ways of working. They can partner with other IT and business leaders to ensure that workflows, incentives and policies encourage and appreciate digital dexterity.

To accelerate digital business, CIOs can ensure that the right capabilities are in place or in development. They can collaborate with senior leaders to identify and assess key digital business competencies (digital strategy and execution, customer experience management, innovation culture, infonomics, etc.) that can be potential accelerators. Based on their assessments, they can determine the strengths and weaknesses of each competency and develop improvement roadmaps to enhance critical capabilities.

To enable digital business acceleration, the onus of delivering information and technology can’t be solely on the IT organization, and there is a need to create multidisciplinary teams. Gartner research shows 84% of companies and 59% of government entities have set up “fusion teams” — multidisciplinary digital business teams that blend technology with other types of domain expertise.

CIOs need to establish a new technology model for the enterprise and shift from operators to orchestrators and digital leaders to decentralize responsibilities, provide resources and manage key technology platforms. They need to manage digital transformation challenges by focusing on the cultural, organizational and behavioral aspects of risk management. This way, they can derive maximum value from the new digital delivery model.

For a successful digital transformation, C-suite leaders should see themselves as digital leaders and manage critical technology processes as a team. CIOs should lead the effort and distribute responsibilities of general management, digital ideation and delivery, digital foundation building and traditional IT management among the C-suite. If few CxOs show reservations or aren’t ready, then CIOs can take specific responsibilities and make them a permanent part of their job profiles.